Yesterday, the Republican leaders in the House all came out from the vote on the bailout bill and tried to blame the defeat on Nancy Pelosi for making partisan remarks at the last minute. You have to give them credit for trying, but that was more transparent than Saran Wrap. Well, here’s her speech. There’s no doubt that it wasn’t the best time to stand up and point fingers, but it’s not like she was making anything up out of thin air (like the people who pulled the figure of $700 billion out of their asses). It made the Republicans look incredibly petty and whiny at the worst possible time, and Barney Frank got in one of the best comeback zingers of all time (you’ll have to listen to Cenk Uygur for about a minute into that clip, but he makes a decent point too). By this morning, though, even the Republicans were willing to go on TV and say that her speech had nothing to do with it.

But Jeebus H. Tittyfucking Christ On A Pogo Stick, the partisanship has to end. There’s no doubt that the bill they brought to the floor was bad — even Pelosi and Frank were willing to say it was a stinker, but as the leadership of the House they had to make the effort. Voting the bill down was without a doubt the best thing that could have happened, because it lays bare the lie that the proposals from Paulson and the administration are anything short of plundering the wealth of the citizens of this country. When the far-right and the far-left (such as we define “right and left” in our political spectrum) wrap around so far that they touch and agree on an issue, then you have truly failed at whatever you were trying to achieve.

What went mostly unnoticed while the House was fighting over all this is that the Federal Reserve did an end-run around them anyway and pumped $630 billiion into the banking system. How did they do that? They borrowed money from the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank. Well now that’s the thing to do when your entire banking system is failing due to unsustainable debt — borrow a little more money from someone else! So now all this cash goes into the system to ease the credit crunch, which is what we’ve been told for the last week was the whole point of the bailout in the first place. And guess what? The stock market is rebounding from yesterday’s big dump! (although the credit market remains locked up)

So the time is NOW to throw out the bill that Barney Frank had to bring to the floor yesterday. There is still a LOT of opposition to the idea of a bailout whatsoever, and with the Fed dumping all that cash to quiet things down, it only shows up the TARP as a ploy to let the banks off the hook and stick the public with the consequences. Below the fold, I give you the complete text of the New York Times Editorial Board’s remarks from this morning’s edition:

After nearly eight years of voting in virtual lock step with President Bush on everything from tax cuts to torture, House Republicans decided on Monday to break ranks on the survival of the nation’s financial system.

The rejected bailout bill that was on the floor after a weekend of hard negotiating was objectionable in many ways, but it was a Republican-generated bill and was improved from the administration’s original version. Sixty percent of House Democrats voted for the bill, enough to easily pass the measure if the Republicans had not decided to put on their display of pique and disarray.

The question now is whether the stock-market plunge that followed the House’s failure to lead — and a renewed credit freeze — will be enough to get the 133 Republicans who voted against the measure to change their minds. And, more important, whether the damage that the no vote has inflicted is readily reversible.

Republican no votes were rooted less in analysis or principle than in political posturing and ideological rigidity. The House minority leader, John Boehner, conceded as much: “While we were able to move the bill drastically to the right, it wasn’t good enough for our members.”

It’s not clear what would be good enough for the Republicans since there was very little talk of substance on Monday after the bill died on the floor of the House. Instead, the Republicans tried to blame their revolt on a speech given before the vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who connected the current crisis to the fiscal and economic mismanagement of the Bush years. It may not have been the perfect moment to say that, but it was true.

Republicans were also upset that serial bailouts represent a rejection of free-market principles. They do. That’s because the free market in finance, unregulated and unsupervised, has failed. And, in its failure, it is inflicting greater damage on an already weak economy.

No amount of amendments to the bailout package will change the administration’s disastrous economic record or erase the manifest failure of the Republicans’ free-markets-above-all ideology.

Since last week, this page has urged Congress to take the time to get the bailout right. Over all, lawmakers have given too little consideration, in public at least, to alternatives to the Treasury’s plan to buy up the bad assets from various financial firms.

In the bill rejected on Monday, the unlimited powers that the Treasury Department had initially sought were curbed, and Congressional oversight was added. But judicial review of Treasury’s purchases was not adequately ensured. The courthouse door was not closed entirely; lawyers could still seek effective remedies for actions that violate the Constitution. But that’s a much higher hurdle than the already formidable barriers in place to discourage lawsuits against the government.

Homeowners were also given short shrift with provisions that mainly urged lenders and the Treasury to do more to help them. That’s unconscionable. The financial crisis is as much a problem for homeowners as for Wall Street investment bankers. Appeals to lenders’ better natures have not worked to bring lasting relief to homeowners. If they are still not working in the coming months, Congress will have to revisit the issue.

Taxpayer protections are also iffy, such as a requirement that in five years, the president must give Congress a plan for recouping any losses from financial firms. What will happen then is anyone’s guess. Lawmakers could decide at that point that taxpayers are the only pit bottomless enough to absorb those losses.

Still, the imperfections in this bill are the result of a democratic process that can be rethought, revisited and reworked. It is better than nothing, which is what some backward-looking House Republicans gave Americans on Monday.

(my highlight about the manifest failure of the Republican mantra of free markets)

Do you see what these people are saying: everything the Republicans have done vis a vis the economy since 1980 (and I would argue since 1968) has been revealed for the lie that it always was. If anything, Pelosi was too light in her assessment, whether it was ill-timed or not.

There remains a problem, however, and the only person I’ve read who has pointed this out is the British columnist Mick Hume writing for Spiked!: We are stuck without any real and workable alternatives to the system we have. In the Thatcher years in Britain, this was sometimes referred to as the “TINA” doctrine — “There Is No Alternative”. Neither the right or the left have been able to put forth a scheme to move forward. Talk has been made about adopting the so-called “Swedish Plan” to address the bank crisis, but that, like the Paulson bailout, is a short-term solution (albeit a far more just and equitable solution than crowning him King Henry).

Yesterday I posted about Bernie Sanders’ general proposal to bring a sort of Second New Deal to bear to address the bank crisis and the depression that could very well stem from the situation. Even that, though, is crisis management and not a larger framework for re-inventing the economic forces that sustain the world’s economy.

For now, I think that is the best that the American government can hope to achieve: to blow away the remnants of almost 30 years of unbridled capitalism and corrupt governance, develop a few critical mechanisms to protect the general public from catastrophic financial failure, and pass an honest and forthright plan to repair the immediate damage to the banking system. That simply won’t happen until the political posturing and outrageous grandstanding by the House Republicans and by John McCain stop.